Day: March 10, 2018

I thought I hit the jackpot when I found my great-great-great-grandfather’s death record on an Ancestry database. That was just the beginning of a journey to break down a brickwall I never expected to crumble.

Once I found Ferdinand’s death record from 1926, I got curious about what else could be found. It would be a pointless effort, I thought, to look for his brothers and sisters without knowing their names nor birth years. I took the easy route and looked for his mother’s death record from 1884.

I was thrilled to find it. Once I saw the maiden name of Littmann, I knew I found the death record of my 4th great-grandmother without a doubt.

Then, my unstoppable curiosity moved onto whether any records could be found on Ferdinand’s siblings. Once I played around with the database by searching through the mother’s first, middle and maiden names and father’s first and middle names, my luck continued.

Two brothers and a sister of my Ferdinand were found in marriage and death records. All three were born too early to have their birth records in the database.

Ferdinand also was born, married and had children before 1874. He already was in Russia (now eastern Poland) in 1870. The genealogy gods are determined to test my patience and push my determination.

Thankfully, Ferdinand’s siblings chose to stay in the family village, allowing me to find his 13 nieces and nephews and 4 grand nieces and nephews. The story of my great-great-great-grandfather is more complete by finding his siblings’ marriage and death records.

Ferdinand left the family village of Schwiebus (now Świebodzin, Poland) about 7 years after his father’s death, with his wife and four kids to live in Bialystok, Russia (now Poland). He lived there for about 60 years and came back to current-day western Poland, most likely due to the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921).

He found a new home about 50 km from his family village in Schwerin an der Warth, Germany (now Skwierzyna) near 1919. His brother, Julius, had already died eight years earlier in the family village.

Then in 1926, the family deaths came in threes. First, Ferdinand’s baby sister, Emilie, died in the family village. Then 15 days later, Ferdinand died 50 km away. Back where Ferdinand left to escape the Polish-Soviet War, his oldest-known child, my great-great-grandmother Marie, died less than 2 months later.

The search to find even more records on this family to expand this story continues, with hopes of finding living descendants of Ferdinand’s nieces and nephews.

It has taken me 8 years to get to this point. So many times patience and determination have been paid back well beyond my imagination. Here is to more waiting and hoping!

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I thought I hit the jackpot when I found my great-great-great-grandfather’s death record on an Ancestry database. That was just the beginning of a journey to break down a brickwall I never expected to crumble. I got the family tree of my ancestors who lived in Russian Poland 8 years ago from a German cousin. … Continue reading Journey to find one record brea […]

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